


Spies Like Us

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), London Spy
Genre: M/M, Not Happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-16 13:35:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15438150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: They say that jealousy is a green-eyed monster.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've long held the belief that Bond and Q in the London Spy universe would not be kind or good people. It was interesting to explore the idea of this a little more, especially considering my thought that Q at least would have had to have been involved somehow in what happened.
> 
> This is not a happy fic. You've been warned.

At the end of the day, he doesn’t regret it.  Can’t, because it was his job; won’t, because he agreed.  He still agrees, even as he closes his laptop, even as the crew hauls away the monitors, even as someone opens the trunk, disconnects the lines and removes the cameras.  Even.

“We cannot have anyone look closely at this.”  It isn’t a question; Wilson, Q’s point of contact from Five on this project, looks worn, frazzled.  Perhaps he hadn’t meant for it to go this far, but Q had known—known from the first, from the videos Wilson had shown of an earnest young man, from the way Turner had looked at his boy, from the tone of voice when Q had shown up, that wary, unsure voice.  Q had known he was going to end up ordering Turner’s death.

The resemblance is half the reason Q’s involved in this one, he knows.  He’s soft around the edges, the product of a comfortable life, with longer, cozier curls and rounder limbs.  The boy is all hard edges, rough, sharp and scratched up. Still, there’s a resemblance, and they’d dressed Q to that resemblance, traded the clothes he’s earned for himself for scruffy denim jeans and a soft flannel shirt, clipped back the curls, done him up with contacts.  It’s enough that Turner had stopped, frozen, on the doorstep. Had let him in. Had sagged, brokenhearted, into the sofa when he realised that today was the day the government had finally come. Q glances sideways at the trunk.

“No,” he agrees, and it is this moment, more than any other in his life, that Q will look back to, will wonder about.  “I know what to do.”

He spends a week picking apart the coding, after.  It’s flawless work, elegant and concise, and just the beauty of it makes him wish he’d done worse to Turner, makes him wish he’d written more fake emails, forged more photographs.  A video, perhaps, of a lookalike pleading on his knees for a cock to suck; he knows there are lookalikes. He knows.

This code is beautiful, and in it are the secrets of love.  The way the heart beats quicker at the sight of a beloved, the way the pupils dilate.  Turner has written in the miniscule drops of sweat on the brow, the salt sex taste of sweat after a night in bed, the trace of lactic acid in the muscles from fatigue.  He’s brilliant, a mind incandescent with its ability to track the untrackable, explain the inexplicable, write into math the things even English can’t express, and. He’s used it to tell the world he’s getting laid.  Q snorts, digs deeper into the code.

It’s the lying, you see.  Men like Q, they need to lie.  They need to be able to lie; the thought of losing that last barrier around himself sets Q’s teeth on edge, burns frozen nitrogen up his spine until he’s shivering scalded.  You cannot take away his ability to lie. To exist is to lie, and it’s here most of all he sees Turner’s inexperience with the world. Here, pressed into the sheets with a bit of rough who had taught him what no one else could and yet missed the most important lesson of all.

Q destroys the code.  There’s no shame, no moment of silence for the technology that he magnetises until he can stick the USB directly to the shop door.  It isn’t enough to delete it; he eradicates it, brutally and thoroughly, and when it appears again on the computer of a former agent he is so furious that his vision nearly whites out, leaving him swaying, dangerously unmoored, at his desk.  Danny. 

Danny, all hard edges and ruthless practicality.  Danny, who’s been insisting loudly and consistently that men like Q have interfered with his life, have taken away his happy ending, and who the fuck promised Danny a happy ending, anyway?  Q snarls, because it wasn’t enough to remove Turner, to destroy the damned mess the man had made; no, Danny will force their hands, will make them do more, do worse. Danny, with no sense of self-preservation.

It only feels a little bit like betrayal, the acrid taste of vomit in the back of Q’s mouth as he tells them, no, no, ominous figures won’t work—no matter how clear Leiter made the threat—no, nor will the deaths of those around him.  What will work, what will scare him—

Infection.  Even the word shakes Q’s shoulders.  He remembers a scare—and he was never a little slag like Danny, never easy with it, never offered himself up to just anyone who wanted it, and the video they catch of that, grainy cell phone footage of someone who looks just enough like a Q straight out of uni….  He doesn’t wank himself raw over that, over no more than the thought of such a lurid, backpage, Soho thing to do. He doesn’t. But he knows from his own late teens in Soho, in Vauxhall, in the kind of clubs where Danny hasn’t been seen in months because Turner made him go good, go clean—infection.  He can’t even watch the security camera’s footage—he knows it worked and worked well.

He doesn’t fall silent, though, this boy.  There’s something steel in his backbone, something unyielding; they kill his friend and it doesn’t stop him.  They destroy his life and it doesn’t stop him. 

He doesn’t trust, at first, and Q can’t blame him.  It’s odd seeing Bond like this, eyes open and guileless.  Innocence fits on Bond’s shoulders like a superhero cape, just as small and plastic and childish.  The boy dodges Bond, nods politely and flees, and Q watches through the screens as Bond finishes his coffee and reads the paper.  The next time Bond places himself in Danny’s path again, he’s learned—tea, this time, in a thermos, on a park bench, and it’s this that catches Danny’s eye.  This, of all things, that draws him back.

“James,” Bond says.  Danny ignores him, puts his head in his palms.  “You seem tired.”

“Thanks for the observation,” Danny says back.  His tone is waspish, even through the tinny speakers.  He sounds truly offended, as if the purple-black bags under his eyes aren’t telling enough.

“No,” Bond says, and Danny pauses, looks up at him.  “I mean, you seem truly exhausted. Are you alright?”

It takes three visits—one lunch in a public place, one out at a bar just this shade of lavender, as if Danny can’t believe that a man who looks like Bond would be out—Q can’t believe that a man who looks like Bond could be willing to sit while a drag queen sings Madame Butterfly’s arias at them in irony so thick Q could slit his wrists.  “James” is; Bond does, and Q watches the first tentative strokes of Danny’s fingertips across Bond’s wrist on the video stolen from a tourist’s phone to confirm what he sees in surveillance: yes, just once, Bond’s fingers twitch, curl, and James smiles, secret and shy.

They fuck, and Q locks himself in his office.  Watches Bond palm skinny thighs, spread them, watches the boy’s cock critically.  It lists to the left, the garden less tended than Q’s own—fewer visitors rambling the path, Q hums, and Bond catches, skips half a beat until eager, soothing hands smooth up the breadth of his back and over his shoulders.

“It’s okay,” Danny murmurs.  He sounds a bit breathless, whispering in the dark.  “It’s okay if I’m your first.”

Poor Bond, Q thinks.  Bad enough to fail in comparison to a dead man.  They come anyway, the three of them. When Bond returns to Q’s office with the weekly exchange, new memory discs for the old, Q’s reviewing the footage from the cell phone.  Bond is a fiddler; he fiddles with everything sitting on Q’s desk for the duration of the debrief, and Q smirks the whole time. It isn’t until later he realises Bond’s turned the microphone on his headset off.

Here in the flush of new romance, Danny isn’t silent, but he loses the hunger of his cause.  Perhaps he’s distracted; perhaps he’s just tired. The first time he catches James with coke, he freezes, eyes wide and startled and almost betrayed, somehow, as if he’d never imagined—Alex wouldn’t have, Q knows.  Wouldn’t have ever. Bond gives Danny space but no promises. The second time he’s caught, Danny joins him. Just a little, just a—he sucks Bond’s cock like a limpet, the kind of slow that says that he still expects to be passed around when he’s like this; after, he cries in the shower and Q leaves the screen up, well after Bond leaves.

He imagines Bond smells of semen, of astroglide, of the secret smells that identify men who have sex with men.  It’s distracting, but only a bit. Q solves the problem during his morning routine, bites his knuckle and wraps his hand around his cock, and only once during his surveillance as Danny takes care of his spoon and Bond shakes the sting of cornflour out of his sinuses.

It ends abruptly, a Thursday.  He hasn’t bothered listening in days; there’s been nothing to listen to but listless sex and giggling.  Q’s as annoyed with Bond as Bond is with him when Bond drops the memory cards; he reaches to get replacements when Bond shakes his head.

“No need.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going soft on the little junkie.”  It’s more bitter than he’d meant. Q doesn’t back down.

“Unlike you, I don’t tape record corpses.”  Ah. Then, at Q’s raised eyebrow, “OD. Last night, I suppose; already blue when I got there this morning.”

“Left it there for him to find, eh?”

“Perhaps so.”

“Hm.”  It takes Q a moment to put away the cards; he’ll review them when he has the time, but he doubts it’s a priority.  The boy hadn’t been worth much near the end. Still. “Do you regret it?”

Bond’s eyes are glaciers.  “No.”

There’s something—“Are you quite alright?”

“I told him.  The truth: that I was a spy and that I’d targeted him.  That I’d copied mannerisms and speech from what was known about Alistair Turner and used them to make him trust me.  And then I left, and I left the bag on the kitchen table. He found it.”

“So he did.  Do you feel responsible?”

“I am responsible.”

“So you are.  Why, then?”

“I was bored.”

“Ah.  Missing life in the field?”

Bond’s lip twitches, ice cracking into floes again.  “Something like that.”

“Would you do it again, then?”

“Which part?  The relationship?  The betrayal? The gay sex?”  The twitch is curling into an open smirk, now.  

Q’s heart thumps hard in his chest.  “Let’s go with all three?” It isn’t casual.  He’s too hungry for the answer to be casual.

“Don’t make me have to.”


	2. In London

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sequel, of sorts, taking things to their natural—inevitable—end.

It’s a year later, two, ten.  Long enough that he doesn’t taste fear’s metallic bite; not so long that his cock doesn’t jump at the slide of Bond’s fingers against his own.  No, not so long. Not so long at all. Not long enough. He opens his door anyway. It’s too late for pretending.

They tumble in together and Q confesses: sometimes, when it's been too much, he wake and bakes.  He's not a junkie—it's pot; don't be such a marm about it—it just takes the edge off a bad week. There have been a lot of bad weeks lately.

And of course Bond isn't put off by that.  It's just pot. They indulge together, smoke sticky sap green and tangling in the whorls of his hair on the bed, and Q blows Bond for hours and hours and neither of them cares that no one comes.

He grows used to it.  To the tangle of their limbs on his bed, to the blunt of Bond’s nails along his back, to the taste of Bond’s spunk and the twisted up tight feeling in the base of his spine until Bond has worked every inch of him to languor.  At first, it’s a thing for a special occasion. They don’t, always, but he likes—he likes to. Likes the way it makes the thoughts chasing around in his head calm, smooth. Likes the way it makes Bond better, makes him mellow, makes him easy; he lies back and lets Q take what he wants.  And Q wants. He wants.

Bond’s fingernails along his scalp.  The fur of Bond’s thighs against his own.  The wire bristle of the hair around Bond’s cock, scrubbing his face pink and flushed and swollen as he lips at it, dazed and dreamy with sex and wanting.  He’s addicted to that cock, if anything; addicted to the way the sunlight drips down the wall as he wastes the day.

But it's every weekend.  Bond never brings it—it's always Q's idea, Q’s stash.  But every weekend is pink eyes on Monday morning and leaving early Friday, sneaking a puff on Wednesday in the park because the weekend was so long ago. 

Q has him in the kitchen, sucking like a dutiful housewife as Bond cooks them dinner.  On the couch, riding treacle slow and cloying like he's melting into the cushions. Against the wall, on the dresser, in the shower, over and over Q bends over and lets him do it to him until.

“You’ve never let me.”  He isn’t wheedling, isn’t yet pleading, but there’s something whiny in his tone.  At first Bond thinks he’s joking, and then:

No, absolutely not.  Bond is cold after the suggestion, refuses to even discuss it, until Q makes up for it, apologises for even suggesting with lips and tongue and clever fingers. Apologises with his own confidences about a lifetime not good enough,  a father who'd left him to the state because he hadn't cared and there had been only one parent on Q's birth certificate when she'd died. Boyfriends who fucked him until the girls said yes, a professor at uni who had let Q blow him in exchange for seeing his work published under the professor's name. 

Bond is silent.  Then: 

“Does it matter so much?  Truly matter so much?” 

And there’s give in it, just enough that it feels like he's manipulating Bond, telling the truth to steal what he wants.  Yes, he admits. It does. 

He's not as familiar with this side of things, he tells Bond, and Bond laughs.  He couldn't tell, and even though it's wry they're both laughing. He adds more lube. 

The first moment is overwhelming.  The slick push, the weight of Bond's arm over his shoulder, the way Bond gasps against his chest hot and damp.  Q freezes; he has to. He can’t not.

From the dark, thin: “It's okay.  It's okay if I'm your first.” 

No one knows, later, though.  They've seen it coming, so no one's surprised, but for months or even years later they'll wonder whether it was Bond who opened the tender skin inside Q's elbow in the bath.  He was there, certainly. His report is thorough up until that point; Q's own camera coverage fails at that point. 

No one knows.   No one's supposed to. 


End file.
